Friday, September 19, 2008

10 years back, when I wanted to prepare for a school essay competition, I had to spend many evenings in the public library near my home. I had to be "very nice" to the librarian so that he could let me use library's archive of newspapers, magazines etc.. Today, I don't need to be nice to anyone, I just google it. Life is much easier these days.

At times, If I don't find the answer on google, I feel, what if I had a search engine which could

search exactly what i wanted, without even breaking everything down to keywords?

search the stories/articles based on image I have?

find me a video relevent to my blog post contents so that i can embed it in my blog?

More over, what if I could

search using natural language, for example, "Find me a story with an exciting chase scene and a happy ending."

do a search in one language (say English) and find the answer if it exists in another language (say Kannada)?

do pervasive search, i.e. do search anytime anywhere?

Looks like all that is possible in my life time. Find out more here. I loved this: "how about a wearable device that does searches in the background based on the words it picks up from conversations, and then flashes relevant facts?" Bond 007 suff? Well, looks like it's not far from reality. I guess I can buy one in my life time :)

Imagine, what if you can't access google search for few minutes? You may still be breathing, but for a moment you may feel that world has stopped functioning. "The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of [Google at 10]." As Alan Kay said, "the best way to predict the future is to invent it." Google has "changed the lives around" by inventing innovative search engine before even systematically organizing the searchable data around the world. Looks like they are going to invent many more things in the future to change the way world function today. I found this "Google at 10" series of articles very interesting. Take a look if you find some time. It's worth looking at the future.